More people have asked me this question recently than ever before: “Should I attend a friends same-sex wedding?” Or, “Should I attend my brother’s same-sex wedding ceremony?”
Continue reading Should I attend a friend’s same-sex wedding?
Category Archives: Culture and Society
How do we interact with our culture and society as followers of Jesus?
Living sent…In community
A couple of weeks ago, Eric Hesse preached on living sent. He talked about Jesus’ instructions and his practice of going to dark places and shining the light of the gospel. One of the metaphors that Eric used was the light department at Menards. His point was that lights were meant to light dark places, not sit next to each other and contribute nothing to an already lit place. Lights aren’t for huddling any more than they are for covering.
However, many Christians have also heard another story about light. The story is about a gentleman who had stopped going to church, and his pastor paid him a visit in the evening.
Educational Theory and the Gospel
I was an education major in my undergrad, and in my educational theory class I was taught three basic theories about human beings.
The first theory is drawn from the Puritans way back in the 1600s who thought that people are basically bad. This was supposedly called the “Old Deluder Satan” theory. Apparently it was taken from a 1642 law that referred to Satan this way. What I wasn’t told, however, was that the purpose of this law was to legislate public education (every town with 50 families had to hire a teacher, and every town with 100 families had to establish a grammar school).
Noah Review
This film is somewhat of an anomaly. Most religiously themed films are either intentionally antireligious or intentionally intensely religious. Also, whenever a film is based on another story, filmmakers always deviate from it for one reason or another. Sometimes it is only because of the difference in mediums – text versus screen.
Then there is the issue of attitude. Evangelicals, because they are human beings, can be judgmental. We want either to affirm the film or to disavow it. And this is a difficult task when others choose to make art with what we find sacred. It is especially difficult when others take our own revealed stories that have their own point and seek to weave into it other points they wish themselves to make.
Worldview Preaching in the Modern Church
How do we preach in the church when we know we exist as a minority culture?
There was a time when this wasn’t a question, a time not all that long ago. But the truth is that this is not the culture in which we, the American church, live. Some lip service is paid to religion. A majority of the population still self-identifies as Christian. Church attendance is still high relative to other places in the “Christian” West. But the culture-forming and worldview-forming mechanisms of culture are not merely neutral toward Christian beliefs, but are decidedly unfriendly toward them.
Cost Effective Compassion Article
This morning, I mentioned a Christianity Today article that talked about 10 of the most popular strategies for helping the poor that were actually cost effective.
You can find the article here.
Remember, this article is not arguing that other ways of helping the poor are bad. There are cost-effective ways of helping the poor, ways of helping the poor that are not cost-effective, and there are means of trying to help the poor that actually hurt them. There are many ways of doing humanitarian work that fall into the second category.
This article only seeks to highlight the top 10 most economically effective ways of helping the material sufferings of the poor.
Engage & Equip 